JISC

Under the UK Climate Change Act 2008, the higher and further education sectors are required to meet carbon reduction targets of 34% by 2020 and 80% by 2050, compared with 1990 levels.

On average, ICT accounts for 27% of a typical UK university’s total electricity consumption, according to our latest results.
By reducing ICT electricity consumption, organisations save cost as well as reduce their carbon emissions.

Our work can help you calculate your ICT-related carbon footprint, store files efficiently, power down idle computers and make savings on your data storage.

• Our ICT energy and carbon footprinting tool, an output from a major study, can help you identify the ICT consumers of energy and producers of carbon within your organisation. 
  Find out how 12 higher education institutions in London used it to discover that personal computers, followed by data centres, printing and computing networks consume the most energy.
• Cardiff University achieved an 80% reduction in the energy used for file storage by storing data on disks with different energy consumptions depending on the frequency with which the data is accessed. Use the tool they developed, StorC, to model the environmental and financial savings your organisation could make with tiered file storage.
• The Powerdown and Wake System can help you power down idle computers automatically. It initiates auto-logout for inactive computers based on usage, lack of keystrokes or pre-configured parameters, such as time of day.
• Inefficient data centres can use twice as much energy for cooling, power supply etc. as for computation. Several UK universities have successfully reduced this overhead consumption, giving their data centres a power usage effectiveness (total energy consumption divided by that of the IT equipment itself) approaching 1. Find out how the University of Hertfordshire reduced this figure to 1.22 and St Andrews University reduced it to 1.2.
• Incentivising staff and students is an essential part of cutting energy consumption. The University of Central Lancashire’s energy dashboard displays campus weekly energy consumption and carbon emissions, highlighting individual buildings that could be greener.
• Join our mailing list to be kept up to date on our green ICT programmes.

Estimates suggest that ICT use will grow by 6% each year until 2020.  Our future work is focusing on the role of energy dashboards in changing energy consumption and on making further energy savings through data centre engineering and cooling.